Enterprises are increasingly capturing, storing, and mining a plethora of information related to communications with their customers. Often this information is stored and indexed within databases. Once the information is indexed, queries are developed on an as-needed basis to mine the information from the database for a variety of organizational goals, such as to produce customer lists or labels.
Frequently, existing database tools and services provide mechanisms for users to acquire customer lists and labels. Producing lists or labels is not the main focus of these tools and services. Consequently, the solutions available are often excessively broad in scope or too narrow to be useful for a given desired application. Moreover, these tools and services often require trained personnel or a fairly substantial amount of training for users to produce any meaningful customer list or set of labels.
In other cases, when an analyst wants to generate a specific list or set of labels from a database, the analyst submits a set of criteria to query specialists. The query specialists than produces the necessary SQL to execute a query against the database and the analyst may subsequently process the query as needed.
There are several inefficiencies associated with this approach. First, the analyst is the individual most knowledgeable as to what the analyst wants and if the analyst misses something or does not appreciate the techniques used by the query specialists, then there may be several iterations with the query specialists before the desired list or set of labels can be produced.
Second, the query specialists often serve many analyst within an enterprise and the query specialists probably has many other responsibilities within an enterprise. As a result, the analyst may not receive his/her query in a timely fashion. Thus, the analyst may be idle for a period of time waiting on the query to proceed or the analyst may miss a business opportunity when the query is time sensitive. The request from the analyst also adds to the workload of an already likely loaded search specialist.
Additionally, the analyst may have a specific amount or number of individuals that the analyst wants to have in the list or set of labels. That is, the analyst may only be able to handle a predefined number of individuals or may only want a certain number of customers. If the query returns more than this desired amount, then the analyst may have to submit a revised request to the search specialists. Conversely, the analyst may receive too few individuals in the search query results and may want to alter the search query, which is developed by the query specialist, to increase the individuals in the list or set of labels. Thus, the process of obtaining the desired size for a list or set of labels can result in unnecessary iterations between the analyst and the search specialist, which can further delay the needs of the analyst and the enterprise.
Thus, it can be seen that improved mechanisms, tools, and/or interfaces for producing lists and labels are desirable.